Mermen For Mike Gravel

Now that Hillary and Barack are close enough in delegates that the election will be decided in a back-room deal or something else equally awesome, it’s (naturally) time to start pretending that your vote counts. As you may know, Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary could be an important one; people will be urging you to vote because your vote could determine who becomes president of the United States.

You can feel free to believe that, but probably not if you’re handicapped. About two months before the primary, 200 of Philadelphia’s polling places are still not ADA-compliant; there doesn’t seem to be much hope that they will be fixed by election time. Of course, the non-compliant locations might be acceptable places to vote for some — they might just not have a parking spot for a handicapped van, for example. Plus, look how hard it is to fix these problems!

“One of the moves was to move a polling place from the 38th ward to the 52nd ward, which meant you’d have had to walk through Fairmount Park, go down across Kelly Drive, swim the Schuylkill, cross the Schuylkill expressway. So that’s the difficulty that we’ve been having.”

Oh, I see. That makes sense, then; we really don’t want to have to make people swim across the river in order to vote.

Phila. Officials Work to Make Polling Places ADA Compliant [KYW 1060]